Hinch: Can this man rebuild church?

Jan. 10, 2013

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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Spencer Burke, of Newport Beach, holds the book that he uses most for his mission work these days: a notebook computer. Burke is launching a church-consulting website called Mission Soulutions. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Spencer Burke, of Newport Beach, believes Christian churches need to figure out new ways to reach young people. His work as a church consultant has been viewed by some as rabble rousing and by others as provacative. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Spencer Burke, of Newport Beach, displays a web page from his church-consulting website called Mission Soulutions. The site is slated to launch Jan. 20. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Spencer Burke's new site, Mission Solutions, will feature inspirational images like this one, taken with his iPhone. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Spencer Burke, of Newport Beach, holds the book that he uses most for his mission work these days: a notebook computer. Burke is launching a church-consulting website called Mission Soulutions. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

What's a church?

Is it volunteers gathering monthly at a Santa Ana Laundromat to provide free laundry to street people?

How about a fair-trade coffee house in suburban Sacramento that dedicates its profits to ending sexual trafficking?

Or is it twice-monthly forays into the nighttime streets of downtown San Diego to hand out food and toiletries to homeless teens?

For Christians, this question—what is a church?—is becoming increasingly urgent.

Polls show American Christianity approaching a difficult crossroads. Church attendance is declining. The number of Americans claiming no religious affiliation is rising. Young peoples' view of Christianity has never been more negative.

At the same time, Christians who do go to church, especially younger Christians, crave a more serious faith with renewed emphasis on social justice. Many are turned off by Christian involvement in politics and preoccupation with sexual morality.

The old way of doing church—gather in a building, sing songs, listen to a sermon, send the kids to Sunday school—doesn't appear sustainable.

But what's next?

Enter Spencer Burke.

Burke, 54, from Newport Beach, is a onetime megachurch pastor who became one of America's most prominent critics of establishment Christianity. For 15 years Burke has been at the forefront of a nationwide movement of Christians disenchanted with what Burke called church leaders' "spiritual McCarthyism."

This month, though, alarmed that many of his warnings about Christianity's loss of cultural authority appear to be coming true, Burke is hanging up his critic's hat.

He's shutting down the website that made him famous—a blog called theooze.com that became a hub for thousands of like-minded church critics—and starting a new venture, an online social community highlighting promising new ways of reaching an increasingly non-Christian America.

Laundry Love in Santa Ana, Origin Coffee and Tea in suburban Sacramento and Urban Street Angels in San Diego are among the numerous unorthodox Christian communities Burke spotlights at Mission Soulutions, his new website slated to launch Jan. 20.

Other featured ventures include a culinary school for low-income people in Atlanta and a group of volunteers who hang out with the homeless in Portland.

The point, said Burke, is to help churches become what they should be, but often aren't — places that "bring life and beauty where things are dead."

"Everything has changed. Medicine has changed. Commerce has changed. But the church hasn't," Burke said. "If you went into almost any other institution and they were running the institution the way they did 150 years ago, you wouldn't feel that was valid."

Burke's evolution "from critic to contributor," as he terms it, comes at a time of deepening division in American Christianity, especially among Protestants, over how to remain vital in secularizing America.

Mainline Protestant denominations are splintering over whether to accept homosexuality. Evangelicals are debating almost every aspect of their faith—the inerrancy of the Bible, the wisdom of building big, corporate-style churches, whether to get involved in politics.

Burke might be uniquely positioned to cut through this debate because, in a wide-ranging career, he's worked with just about every camp in the church.

He's regarded warily at best by conservatives. But no one questions his reach. At its height, theooze (which is being archived at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena) drew 250,000 monthly readers, mostly young, disaffected evangelicals eager for Burke's indictment of what he saw as mainstream Christianity's numerous departures from Jesus' teachings.

Jesus, Burke said, wanted his followers to meet the world with God's grace, not with huge, expensive institutions focused on sexual morality and self-proclaimed biblical literalism.

After awhile, though, Burke began to feel that the movement he'd helped start—it became known as the Emerging Church—had run its course. What about solutions, he wondered? What should churches do to stave off decline and become indispensable to their communities?

Mission Soulutions is the attempted answer.

Burke said he foresees a future when Christians spend less time singing and socializing in buildings and more time solving problems in their neighborhoods. Churches, currently devoted to rituals and raising money, could become community centers, schools, homeless shelters, food distribution points—whatever communities need.

"One size fits all won't be the answer for the future," he said.

One size certainly hasn't fit Burke's career. He grew up the son of a Republican state assemblyman from Huntington Beach, attending Santa Ana's Calvary Chapel in its early days as headquarters for a Christian hippie movement.

He graduated from Biola University and Talbot Seminary, spent time at a Christian commune in Berkeley, helped found a Vineyard church in Newport Beach and worked his way up through various Orange County ministry jobs to become a teaching pastor at Mariners, where he earned $100,000 per year and jetted off with his wife for vacations in London and Paris.

"I got to the top one percent of my industry," he said. "But then, what was there? Is it just about money? Or can I help people in a real way?"

Burke began reading "off the approved evangelical reading list"—Catholic monk Thomas Merton, Zen Buddhist Tich Nhat Hanh. It bothered him that he couldn't quote such writings in his sermons, even though pastors at the time were enthusiastically quoting business luminaries such as Enron CEO Ken Lay, later convicted of felony fraud.

In 1998 Burke resigned from Mariners—he said the parting was amicable—and started theooze. He and his wife Lisa got by on her consulting job and his occasional speaking and publishing gigs. The Burkes, who have two children, still drive the Volkswagen Golf and Chrysler minivan they had 10 years ago. "Cash flow is a very difficult thing," Burke lamented.

Does Burke point the way forward for American Christianity?

That depends on what needs changing in the church. It's true that demographic trends don't currently favor Christianity in America, especially Protestantism, whose adherents are markedly older than Catholics, Muslims, Hindus and the religiously unaffiliated.

And yet it's by no means proved that institutional or theological rigidity are the church's main problems. Also, it's difficult to foresee large numbers of people upending their lives to become the kind of Christian who spends free time hanging out on Skid Row or doing other people's laundry.

And many evangelicals will object that Burke's approach leaves out core Christian teachings about personal salvation by Jesus.

It's safer to say that Burke's quest for authentic Christian ministry signals a growing sense of urgency in the church about loss of cultural relevance. It could be a good sign, or it could be a bad sign, that Christians are willing to try anything, even a Laundromat, to spread the Good News.

Two weeks ago, after more than a decade of not attending church at all, Burke took his family to a local neighborhood Disciples of Christ church. The Disciples are a 200-year-old Protestant denomination started by reformers on the Kentucky frontier. Burke said he became interested in the Disciples because they have no official creed—"their creed is Christ," he said—and because the denomination was started as an effort to unify other Christians.

At Harbor Christian Church Burke quickly got a lesson in what established churches face when trying to minister to a changing culture.

Harbor, a small, 53-year-old congregation, helps pay the bills by sharing its building with a Korean church and a Jewish synagogue. The church employs no Emerging Church razzle-dazzle in Sunday worship. A recent copy of the weekly bulletin shows exactly one regular event on the calendar, a 10:30 a.m. Thursday Bible study.

"I need community and relationship and I'm dying for that," Burke said. "What I also think the church could do is be a little more alive."

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